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I had my first Mars bar in four years today. The sun was shining, and it was surprisingly hot, so we went out Alton Water, just south of Ipswich. It didn’t look so big on the map, but when we set out to walk around the rim, we discovered that maps can be deceiving.

It took almost five hours to get around, as we stopped so often to take pictures of the trees and the wildlife, and as the day went on the weather got better and better. It was so hot by the time we got to the bridge half way around that we had to take off our coats and jumpers and tie them around our camera bags to keep us cool.

Spring was certainly well underway. The gauze was in bloom, flowers were poking their way through the grass, and sticky buds were growing on the end of the chestnut branches.

We sat down for a while on the grass around a small lake, where the frogs were busy spawning just below the water. The surface was laced by strings of tiny black pearls, which would one day become tadpoles and eventually new frogs. They were nothing like the gloopy sago-like spawn I remember from childhood.

At times, when we had trees on one side and the glare of the sun on the water to the other, it felt like civilisation was miles away. There was no sound of traffic or chatter, and once we got to the far side of the water we only occasionally came across the odd walker with a dog. For some that we passed the hills were too much, and they turned back, but while steep they were not particularly long, and they were soon behind us as we marched on for eight and a half miles, detouring slightly to find a pub that turned out to be a long, long way off the track.

We never did find it, and so pushed on around the last third of the lake, over the dam and back to the point from which we’d set out, so we could sit down with a bright mug of tea, and the Mars bars we’d promised ourselves from the half way point.

Never had chocolate tasted so good.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.